The Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture retrieves content by names rather than connecting to specific hosts. It provides benefits such as highly efficient and resilient content distribution, which fit well to data-intensive distributed computing. This paper presents and discusses our experience in modifying Apache Hadoop, a popular MapReduce framework, to operate on an NDN network. Through this first-of-its-kind implementation process, we demonstrate the feasibility of running an existing, large, and complex piece of distributed software commonly seen in data centers over NDN. We show advantages such as simplified network code and reduced network traffic which are beneficial in a data center environment. There are also challenges faced by NDN, that are being addressed by the community, which can be magnified under data center traffic. Through detailed evaluation, we show a reduction of 16% for overall data transmission between Hadoop nodes while writing data with default replication settings. Preliminary results also show promise for in-network caching of repeated reads in distributed applications. We also show that overall performance is currently slower under NDN, and we identify challenges and opportunities for further NDN improvements.